Inherent Vice (2014)

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Not many films nail the look and feel of their time period as well as Inherent Vice; you can smell Paul Thomas Anderson’s love for grimy ‘70s flicks. I like Phoenix quite a bit here and his scenes with Brolin are great, but the actual movie is pretty uneventful and uninteresting. Now, I like plenty of movies where “nothing happens,” but the scale of this movie made it feel like a more substantial plot was missing (especially considering the runtime). There are a ton of scenes in this movie that’d be so much better if there was a cohesive story to pull everything together, but that never came along. Knowing his other work, I respect Anderson’s restraint to overuse a cliched soundtrack here, even though the movie becomes more bland as it goes on. All that being said, this is probably one of Tarantino’s favorite movies of the 21st century.

8/31/23